Ending The Imperium Campaign

Life’s been a touch hectic for me these last several months, so I never got to do my written post mortem on The Imperium campaign. So here’s my wrap up, even if it is a tad bit late.

The last session ended with the party succeeding in out lasting Prince Tasran and his lich necromancer. With reinforcements streaming into the crypts under the castle, the heroes knew that they had triumphed over the would be killer of the Emperor. As they were inspecting the area, Will the half-elf wizard took special interest in a portal circle that was inscribed in a corner. Prince Tasran had attempted to use it during the combat to flee, but was unable to activate it, much to the amusement of the lich.

Will however was able to use the portal, which took him into a space that contained an altar and several statutes dedicated to evil gods and demons. Quickly using the portal back, he brought the party into the space to show them this. Those magically attuned in the group could feel that in this chamber, the boundary between the realms of mortals and the realms of the gods were thinning here.

Lita, Ayrlen, Will, Xen, and Mritha focused their understanding of the divine and arcane magics to repair the boundary. With that job complete, a silver portal opened and out stepped several NPCs that the party had worked with over the campaign. Father Denek, Vrash, Alarishic, the high priestess of the temple of Denarri, and a couple others. With a sudden flood of energy, these folks were revealed to be incarnations of some of the gods. They revealed that the party had ended a plot by several evil gods to unleash the power of the god of chaos. That the world had faced this crisis before, when the empire was founded, and that heroes then had prevented that breach. But the forces of the evil gods had somehow wiped out the remembrance of this. The gods expressed their gratitude with the party, telling them that great things still were ahead of them.

And that was the end of nearly four years of shared storytelling. For most of us involved it was the longest running campaign we’ve ever been involved in and for the most part the only one that ended because we decided it was time to move forward. I think for most of the players, they’d enjoyed the experience. For many, it was their first time playing D&D and for a few it was their return to it.

Fourth Edition D&D has a lot of good things going for it, but it also has some drawbacks. It’s hard for me to fault the system because I was always playing with a party of 7 to 9 players. Challenging the party was becoming a major exercise for me. Leveling up the characters was becoming quite a chore for the players, with some having a bit of analysis paralysis going through all the available feats or powers.

However, I loved this setting. I loved this campaign. I loved these characters. Maybe someday down the road, we’ll comeback to the Empire of Solvestra.

For now however, we’re going to be playing the 5th Edition of Shadowrun. I’m going to be playing. I’m also taking part in a live D20 Star Wars game at https://www.twitch.tv/itsjustgamenight. Hopefully the first session will be back online, but in the future I’ll be running two sessions as a game master there.

My apologies for not posting more frequently, but my real world has changed drastically. I’ll try to update more often, especially with content that will be helpful for those out there interested in running games.